Telson

“ FIG. 153.—The aerial system of a transatlantic station.
The wireless telephone enables a passenger on board ship to communicate direct with his home by relaying the message over the line wires. By the same means the captain of a ship can call his home office and communicate with the owner of the vessel.
Telegraphs and telephones are the nerves of the world, carrying swift messages from its brain centers to its hands, annihilating distance in thought. All differences between men as individuals and people as nations can be traced to the lack of close contact. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ART
Four wire-using businesses were already in the field when the telephone was born: the fire-alarm, burglar-alarm, telegraph, and messenger-boy service; and at first, as might have been expected, the humble little telephone was huddled in with these businesses as a sort of poor relation. To the general public, it was a mere scientific toy; but there were a few men, not many, in these wire-stringing trades, who saw a glimmering chance of creating a telephone business. ”

“ It had tried to operate a telephone system on telegraphic lines, a plan that has invariably been unsuccessful, it had a low idea of the possibilities of the telephone business; and its already busy agents had little time or knowledge or enthusiasm to give to the new enterprise. With all its power, it found itself outfought by this compact body of picked men, who were young, zealous, well-handled, and protected by a most invulnerable patent.
The Bell Telephone now took its place with the Telegraph, the Railroad, the Steamboat, the Harvester, and the other necessities of a civilized country. ”

“ Railways and steamships had begun this work of binding man to man by "nobler and cunninger methods." The telegraph and cable had gone still farther and put all civilized people within sight of each other, so that they could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And then came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication and putting the people of each nation within hearing distance of each other. ”

“ Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephone exchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, he said: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factory with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable with a central office." ”

“ The first attack upon the young telephone business was made by the Western Union Telegraph Company. It came charging full tilt upon Bell, driving three inventors abreast—Edison, Gray, and Dolbear. It expected an easy victory; in fact, the disparity between the two opponents was so evident, that there seemed little chance of a contest of any kind. "The Western Union will swallow up the telephone people," said public opinion, "just as it has already swallowed up all improvements in telegraphy." ”

“ Wireless telegraphy is part of the established order of things. The wireless telephone is practical for limited distance, but is not a commercial rival of the telegraph. Great distances are claimed, but they are matters for proof and speculation.
There is no immediate possibility that wireless telephony will take the place of local exchanges. If the time ever does come that it in any way tends to supplant the line telephone for some uses, it is more than probable that each subscriber must have his own generating station and call up direct. ”

“ A shell has just burst under one of our windows, breaking the panes and staining the Adjutant Major's papers with mud. Our roof is like a sieve at present. One or other of us is all the time at the telephone. The wires are broken constantly by the shells. The telephonists run along and the communication is set up again. Night and day, we hear the strident ring of the tele [Pg 265] phone bell. Some information arrives, or an order is given, one of the officers gets up, rushes off to the battery—and a telephonic message orders us to stop firing for the moment. ”

“ In some farming States, the enthusiasm for the telephone is running so high that mass meetings are held, with lavish oratory on the general theme of "Good Roads and Telephones." And as a result of this Telephone Crusade, there are now nearly twenty thousand groups of farmers, each one with a mutual telephone system, and one-half of them with sufficient enterprise to link their little webs of wires to the vast Bell system, so that at least a million farmers have been brought as close to the great cities as they are to their own barns. ”

“ The Western Union Telegraph Company collects messages in communities of origin and dispatches them by electrical impulses to places of destination where they are distributed. Messengers are employed in both collection and distribution. A little under 12 per cent of the messenger force is under sixteen years of age, and about .0033 per cent are from sixteen to eighteen years of age, engaged in the operation of motor vehicles, scooters, and telemotors. ”

“ To tell the doings of a wire chief, in the course of his ordinary week's work, would in itself make a lively book of adventures. Even a washerwoman, with one lone, non-electrical clothes-line of a hundred yards to operate, has often enough trouble with it. But the wire chiefs of the Bell telephone have charge of as much wire as would make TWO HUNDRED MILLION CLOTHES-LINES—ten apiece to every family in the United States ”

“ The wire chiefs must detect trouble under a thousand disguises. Perhaps a small boy has thrown a snake across the wires or driven a nail into a cable. Perhaps some self-reliant citizen has moved his own telephone from one room to another. Perhaps a sudden rainstorm has splashed its fatal moisture upon an unwiped joint. Or perhaps a submarine cable has been sat upon by the Lusitania and flattened to death. But no matter what the trouble, a telephone system cannot be stopped for repairs. ”

“ They will have charts and diagrams hung in the telephone booths, so that the person who is waiting for a call may learn a little and pass the time more pleasantly. They will, in a word, attend to those innumerable trifles that make the perfection of public service.
Already the Bell System has gone far in this direction by organizing what might fairly be called a foresight department. Here is where the fortune-tellers of the business sit. When new lines or exchanges are to be built, these men study the situation with an eye to the future. ”

“ Telegraphers know, though the general public may not, that messages can be sent by touching together the ends of a cut telegraph wire, and can be received by holding the ends to the tongue. My tongue, however, has always been too sensitive to take that kind of "subtle fluid."
Telegraphers have many methods of secret communication with each other: rattling teaspoons or tapping knives and forks at the table, or the apparently aimless "Devil's tattoo" of the fingers on the table or armchair are common methods, and I have heard of one in a tight corner who winked out a message appealing for help. ”

“ Kurt said. “But seriously.”
“Seriously,” Lyman said. “Seriously. Think a second about the scale of a telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We’ve got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can’t see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and the wires? Those are our wires. It’s a lot of goodness, especially for a big, evil phone company. ”

“ This city of Telephonia would be the capital of an empire of wire. Not all the men in New York State could shoulder this burden of wire and carry it. Throw all the people of Illinois in one end of the scale, and put on the other side the wire-wealth of Telephonia, and long before the last coil was in place, the Illinoisans would be in the air. ”

“ Telegraphers are, as a rule, a very nomadic class, wandering hither and thither like a chip buffeted about on the ocean. Their pathway is not always one of roses, and many times their feet are torn by the jagged rocks of adversity. I was no different from any of the rest, neither better nor worse, and many a night I have slept with only the deep blue sky for a covering, and it may be added—sotto voce—it is not a very warm blanket on a cold night. 'Tis said, an operator of the first class can always procure work, but there are times when even the best of them are on their uppers. ”

“ How well do I remember the many journeys I made over the Alleghany Mountains by stage to Pittsburg, Brownsville, and Wheeling, and how steam power superseded horse power in ferryboats, treadmills, and sailing vessels on the ocean!
I have told you how I went with Prof. Morse to receive what may be deemed the first message of the telegraph; now we send messages around the world.
In 1862 I saw a telephone established from one house to another, 351 distant about fifty yards, by two young ladies in Wilmington, N. C., to communicate with each other. To-day we talk face to face a thousand miles. ”

“ It is estimated that in the United States as many messages are sent by telephone as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers. The telephone wires are eight times greater than the telegraph wires, and their earnings six times as great. It is true that the telephone is vastly more used in America than in other parts of the world, and yet it is figured that in the world at large almost as many messages are now telephoned as are sent by post. ”

“ Wireless telephony, like wireless telegraphy, but to an even greater extent, is peculiarly suited for the conveyance of marine intelligence. Wireless telephony occupies a unique position in this regard-no operator is required. The additional expense of an operator is an objection to the wireless telegraph in many cases, and forbids its installation. Anybody can operate the wireless telephone. It is also much quicker-words can be spoken more rapidly than they can be put into Morse signals and translated. ”

“ When I was chief wireless operator on the Andalusian I met operators from all over the world. Once when I was in London I scraped up an acquaintance with a young Swede and he had about half-a-dozen pairs of head-phones that he had picked up in different countries. Telephone receivers for wireless work are like violins in that no two of them are alike and you can’t tell by their appearance what they are really worth; like violins, too, telephone receivers improve with age provided the magnets are made of the right kind of steel and properly tempered. ”

“ I traced the wires from the place they entered the building and sure enough I found a relay with a high resistance coil in the circuit. I cut it out with a piece of wire across the binding posts and rushed back to my telephone and listened. That was the trouble. Plainly as one could wish came Bell’s “ahoy,” “ahoy!” [1] I ahoyed back, and the first long distance telephone conversation began. Skeptics had been objecting that the telephone could never compete with the telegraph as its messages would not be accurate. ”

“ Canada stands second, with almost four per hundred; and Sweden is third. Germany has as many telephones as the State of New York; and Great Britain as many as Ohio. Chicago has more than London; and Boston twice as many as Paris. In the whole of Europe, with her twenty nations, there are one-third as many telephones as in the United States. In proportion to her population, Europe has only one-thirteenth as many.
The United States writes half as many letters as Europe, sends one-third as many telegrams, and talks twice as much at the telephone. ”

“ There are still some dear old ladies who, on receipt of a telegram, make a rapid mental survey of the entire roster of their near and distant relatives and wonder whose death or illness the message may announce before they open the fateful envelope, only to find that up-to-date Cousin Mary, who has learned that the telegraph is as readily used as the mail and many times more rapid and efficient, wants to know whether they can come out for the week-end. ”

“ He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. The man in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as the man in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree of efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking. The German engineers have not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in the United States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, and so have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and indifferent. ”

“ Then I can go and stay at Warfinger and—and see to improvements, and so on; and then if Maud wanted me she can write or telegraph. I can fill up a telegraph-form with only the word 'Come,' and she can keep it in her purse and send it off the moment she wishes to see me. I'll leave word at the telegraph-office in Daneford, that anyone bringing me that telegram in half an hour shall have a sovereign.
"I daresay I could have a wire to the Island, so there need be no delay. But it would look strange. I'll make the messenger's fee five pounds, that will be better. ”

“ The telegraph company was organized in 1851, and immediately thereafter began the work of constructing and operating telegraph lines. Its system extended throughout the United States and Canada, and connected with lines in Mexico and Central and South America by means of submarine cables, and with telegraph systems of foreign countries. ”